Ontology based fake news detection for Sinhala language

Abstract

With the current trend in extensive use of internet technologies, people are accustomed to a life of being online. Similar phenomena apply for news awareness as well where social media has become one of the main sources of information of these tech-savvy people. Even though it gives easy access to information, there is a problem with the trustworthiness and authenticity of the news posted on social media. As such, fake news detection in social media platforms has become an active research area. Despite that, for the Sinhala language, there are only a few attempts carried out to detect fake news. With this background, this research project has come up with a novel idea of ontology-based fake news detection for news published using Sinhala language. We believe that content-based fake news identification is the most appropriate method to assess the truthiness of a news article and our system was able to give promising results in detecting fake news.